The morning after Hurricane Ike slammed Houston, Joyce Washington sat down for breakfast with her fiance and three children. She'd spent a sleepless night positioning pots and pans to catch rainwater seeping through the apartment roof, but now she figured the worst was over.

That's when Washington's life fell to pieces around her. The leaky ceiling suddenly collapsed, upending the table and littering the dining room with plaster and insulation.

Minutes later, the ceilings in the children's bedroom and kitchen fell in, too.

More than a month after the storm, Washington is losing sleep for another reason: She's worried her family will end up on the street when the city's last Red Cross shelter closes on Sunday.

The empty big-box retail space at 6059 South Loop East was one of 24 shelters the Red Cross opened in the Greater Houston area during Hurricane Ike. It housed more than 1,000 people at the height of the Ike recovery effort. Today, nearly 300 remain.

As most Houstonians begin to move on from Ike, Washington and others like her find themselves stuck in post-hurricane limbo, paralyzed by circumstances or baffled by bureaucracy.

At the South Loop shelter, they sleep on cots grouped in numbered grids divided by blue masking tape on the tiled floor. Under the glare of industrial lights, they hover protectively over their few remaining belongings, mostly stacked nearby in boxes or tucked underneath their beds. When they talk about the future, they cry.

Washington sorted through photos of her ruined apartment that show exposed wooden beams and soggy debris coating furniture and floors.

A FEMA inspector denied her claim and told her that the place was habitable, she said. But Child Protective Services said that if Washington stayed in such an unsafe environment, they could take her children away from her, so she moved to the shelter. She has appealed FEMA's decision, but still hasn't heard back, she said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Washington was 96th in line at the shelter to talk to FEMA representatives again.

"Right now I'm just waiting," she said with her 1-year-old son Davion in her arms. "I can't do anything but wait."

Transitional housing

Sheila Willis' FEMA application snagged on her lack of identification. She hitched a ride with a friend to evacuate ahead of the storm and took refuge at a shelter in the George R. Brown Convention Center, where someone stole her purse. Her ID, other important papers and most of her money were inside.

Ike swept away Willis' car and her Crystal Beach home, leaving her stranded. She has no home to go back to and no way of getting there even if she did, she said. "Even if (the FEMA adjuster) called and said OK, we're going to go out and look at your property, what am I going to do? Thumb it?" Willis said.

She wants to go stay with a friend in Oklahoma City, where she grew up, but no one at the shelter has been able to tell her how to get there with her seven boxes of clothes and personal belongings.

"That's all I own in the world," she said.

Willis said she has no idea what she will do when the shelter closes on Sunday.

Red Cross officials said the organization made a joint decision with the city and other governmental agencies to close the shelter and move residents into transitional housing.

The Red Cross mission is to provide short-term emergency relief, not permanent housing, said Denise Bishop, a spokeswoman for the local chapter.

"At some point, the responsibility has to kind of pass on to governmental agencies," said Bishop. "The Red Cross is a nonprofit organization dependent on donations and dependent on volunteers to deliver the majority of these services," she said, "and for that very reason we can't be a long-term care agency."

Shelters elsewhere

On Oct. 26, the Red Cross is scheduled to close its last shelter in Galveston. A date has not been set for the Red Cross' final shelter in Baytown.

"Our goal obviously is for everyone to have the resources that will provide some type of housing for them," Bishop said. "There also are some people here who are homeless and were homeless before the storm, and we've had different homeless agencies here to help them."

The city housing department is working with the Red Cross to find shelter for people on an interim basis, said Cindy Gabriel, spokeswoman for Houston's Ike recovery effort.